He Says, She Says: The Frighteners (1996)

[In this series, my husband Jonathan and I each write our reactions to films we watch together. Many of these films are ones that one of us is specifically sharing with the other, but it may also just be films that we watch and want to write about.]

She Says…

When Jonathan mentioned that he’d like to put this on his list for me to watch, I was kind of like, whatever. I didn’t know anything about it except that it was Peter Jackson before he became Lord of the Rings Peter Jackson, and that it was a horror-type movie with a somewhat goofy edge. At least, I think I knew about the goofy edge – Jon usually doesn’t pick straight-up horror movies for me to watch, so maybe I just inferred that.

Anyway, there IS a goofy edge, and I loved it. Michael J. Fox is a paranormal investigator or something – basically he offers his services to exorcise poltergeists from people’s houses, thanks to a near-death experience that allows him to see ghosts who are sticking around earth for whatever reason instead of shuffling off to the great light in the sky. When a bunch of people die of apparent freak heart attacks and Fox’s spidey sense sees numbers carved in their foreheads, he figures something’s up and starts investigating.

For some reason I did think it was from the ‘80s, so I was expecting super-cheesy SFX, but the effects in here are actually quite good. The ghosts moving through walls bits were quite effective, and the semi-transparent, glowy look of Fox’s poltergeist pals was amusing as well. Though the tone is largely silly, there are some real thrills, as well, especially when Fox and his lady friend (Trini Alverado, who I only had seen in Little Women before) go into an old hospital, aka the creepiest places ever, in search of the means to defeat the big bad.

I didn’t have very high expectations for this one, but I enjoyed the heck out of it. Chalk up another hit for Jonathan – he’s getting to know my tastes pretty well!

My Souvenir: The hospital sequence toward the end. Abandoned hospitals are super-creepy to begin with, especially when they’re psychiatric hospitals. And I love this sort of creepy – it sends my spine tingling like nothing else. Then add in the fact that Fox keeps being thrust back and forth between the present (creepy abandoned) hospital and the past working (still kinda creepy) hospital, which hits all of my paranormal/alt universe/time travel type buttons (not that those things were actually happening, but they’re in the same ballpark), and I totally loved it. It also upped the suspense a lot, because Fox couldn’t control when he swapped back and forth, which meant that he couldn’t always tell when the crazy attacker was right on top of him or not. Very effective and very fun.

He Says…

There’s Lord of the Rings Peter Jackson, and then there’s everything before that. The Frighteners was the first of his pre-fantasy films I decided to watch and boy was I in for a treat. The film had the sillies and willies in equal measure, and I was struck by just how well it all came together. Of course, I then watched some of his other films and realized that this shouldn’t have been a surprise. In fact, it’s surprising what he was able to do with dwarves and hobbits given his penchant for “morbid screwball.” Perhaps no one watched his earlier work when giving him the reins to the most beloved fantasy franchise of all time?

But I digress.

The major standout of The Frighteners for me is the special effects. From spectres trying to break free of the walls to a mean Grim Reaper (pretty much a prototype for the LOTR Ringwraith), it all looks good. You can tell that WETA Workshop will become a real force in the SFX world. I especially liked the ghosts that inhabited this world. That effect is almost too good to be in a movie from 1996.

Overall, this is a fun movie that has some great effects and an interesting take on ghosts and the afterlife. The characters are zany and the plot is a bit out there, but therein lies the fun. I’d place this after Galaxy Quest and Mystery Men in the list of flicks to watch to understand where I’m coming from.

Many of my classic film blogger buddies are already at TCM Film Fest RIGHT NOW – I won’t be able to get there until Friday night, but in the meantime, here’s my preview post at Flickchart that runs down some of the films easily available to watch at home if you’re not able to go to the fest, and some films that aren’t easily available at all to whet your interest in making it to the fest next year. Hope to see you this year or a future one!

I need to do better about cross-referencing the stuff I write elsewhere in this little “elsewhere” column. That’s what it’s here for! I’m continuing to write TCM programming guides every month at the Flickchart blog (April’s will be…soon…I’m behind), and managing the Decades series, where we look back at films celebrating decade anniversaries this year.

For April, we looked back 90 years to 1927, a watershed year in the history of cinema with the exploding popularity of sound films, but also possibly the height of silent film artistry. All of the films featured in the post are silent (The Jazz Singer did not make Flickchart’s Global Top Ten), and it’s an embarrassment of riches. Check it out!

Video essayist Kogonada tends to let images and editing speak for themselves, and that’s precisely what he does here (with a slight bit of added Godard-esque typography, mostly to translate French audio), juxtaposing shots from various 1960-1967 Godard films to highlight recurring techniques. It’s pretty obvious to anyone who watches Godard’s early work that he had some specific things on his mind, but seeing it put together like this with excellent music and editing choices is mesmerizing and wonderful.

Chuck Jones is by far my favorite animation director of all time, and Tony Zhou is currently my favorite video essayist. Put them together? Yep, this is nine must-see minutes right here. And I’m also reminded that I need to get back to my Looney Tunes series that I started months ago and seemingly abandoned – but I didn’t, I promise! It’s just delayed.

“There’s an old story, borne out by production records, about [producer] Arthur Hornblow Jr. deciding to exert his power by handing [Billy] Wilder and [Charles] Brackett’s fully polished draft [of the screenplay for 1939’s Midnight] to a staff writer named Ken Englund. (Like many producers, then and now, Hornblow just wanted to put some more thumbprints on it.) Englund asked Hornblow what he was supposed to do with the script, since it looked good enough to him. “Rewrite it,” said Hornblow. Englund did as he was told and returned to Hornblow’s office with a new draft whereupon the producer told him precisely what the trouble was: it didn’t sound like Brackett and Wilder anymore. “You’ve lost the flavor of the original!” Hornblow declared. Englund then pointed out that Brackett and Wilder themselves were currently in their office doing nothing, so Hornblow turned the script back to them for further work. Charlie and Billy spent a few days playing cribbage and then handed in their original manuscript, retyped and doctored with a few minor changes. Hornblow loved it, and the film went into production.”

“For the refugees, a harsh accent was the least of their troubles. The precise cases, endless portmanteaus, and complex syntactical structure of the German language made their transition to English a strain. It required a thorough rearrangement of thought. In German, the verb usually comes at the end of the sentence; in English, it appears everywhere but. In German, conversation as well as written discourse, like a well-ordered stream through a series of civilized farms, flows. In English, such constructions are stilted. We like to get to the point and get there fast. For a displaced screenwriter – an adaptable one, anyway – American English lend itself to the kind of direct, immediate, constantly unfolding expressivity that German tended to thwart. Linguistically at least, American emotions are more straightforward. The violinist Yehudi Menuhin puts it this way: ‘When you start a sentence in German, you have to know at the beginning what the end will be. In English, you live the sentence through to the end. Emotion and thought go together. In German, they’re divorced. Everything is abstract.’

For a flexible storyteller like Billie Wilder – or Joseph Conrad or Vladimir Nabokov, for that matter – the new mix of languages was wondrous, pregnant with sounds and bursting with meaning. Wilder’s ear picked up our slang as well as our pragmatic syntax, and his inventive, hard-edged mind found twentieth-century poetry in them. Puns, jokes, verbal color, even the modern-sounding American tones and resonances one could make in the mouth – all were deeply engaging to the young writer-ranconteur. It was exciting for him to get laughs in a new language.”